Category Archives: Inquiry Project

At the end of the day I always feel that I’m short of what I wanted to achieve. The paintings are a struggle to try to get to work. To some extent they often fall short of my aspirations. That’s what keeps you going. You start on the next one because you always feel that you might get closer to this goal of the ideal painting. Sometimes you see it. Or you see other art that inspires you and you come back to the studio and think, ‘Oh, my work is so dull,’ so you try and improve.
– Glenn Brown, interviewed in Art in America, April, 2009.

Thanks to Casey Trittipio for this lovely detail shot from my show:

Show Info: Debora Miller’s installation I’m Not Me, She’s Over There, and its companion outdoor piece Horizon Grid (viewable 24/7), is up until February 22nd at Susan Hensel Gallery. Open Mondays 10-5, and by generous appointments.

The most important thing artists can do now is to stretch the present moment. Life is becoming faster and faster, and so we have to absolutely make art slower and slower.

-Marina Abramović, interviewed in Art in America, May 2009.

For an amazing example of Marina Abramović’s durational artwork see ART:21 on pbs. Her section is at about the 35 minute mark, but the whole program is worth the time.

Show Info: Debora Miller’s installation I’m Not Me, She’s Over There, and its companion outdoor piece Horizon Grid (viewable 24/7), is up until February 22nd at Susan Hensel Gallery. Open Mondays 10-5, and by generous appointments.

With the installation work, I wanted to implicate the viewer in a phenomenological situation where the experience is more physical and direct. I wanted the visual aspect of the work to engage the viewer in a physical, sensual, maybe even emotional way; the associations and search for meaning come after that. And although the title might direct your attention to one aspect of the work, I hope the work remains open enough to allow different interpretations.

Show Info: Debora Miller’s installation I’m Not Me, She’s Over There, and its companion outdoor piece Horizon Grid (viewable 24/7), is up until February 22nd at Susan Hensel Gallery. Open Mondays 10-5, and by generous appointments.

It’s when I am looking though the lens, that the images are revealed to me. I have an extremely shallow depth of field, and the subject sort of emerges from this mist of focus. Sometimes I actually shoot the mist — and like the effect. I think the impressionistic quality is in some ways more like reality. I don’t put a lot of stock in what would be called straight realism, because I think that’s really a reduction of what we actually see in life. When we look at things up close, and really focus on them, the rest of the world becomes kind of a mystery. Your mind expands to fill in the gaps.

I don’t have to give myself a label. What I can do is say ‘no’ to certain things. For example, if I’m invited to do a photography show, I tend to say no. The medium itself, I find, is a relatively boring context. You never see a show about acrylic paint. If it’s that kind of understanding of the medium, it’s completely uninteresting on an intellectual level. I make art. I don’t come from a photographic background and I try to stay away from contexts where the work is diminished down to how it’s made. For example, I wouldn’t do a show about Fuji film.

If you asked me the sum total– what is your ambition?…Basically it’s just to make you a little more aware than you were the day before of how beautiful the world is. It’s not saying that I know what the world should look like. It’s not that I am rebuilding the world. Basically what artists do is to teach you how to exercise your own potential– they always have, that’s the one thread that goes all the way through.

I love being totally in the moment, when everything comes together and is just right. You actually see things clearer. But I can spend weeks in the park without ever seeing anything interesting and I never know whether it is because it simply isn’t there or because I just didn’t see it.

Does the contemporary art world find something dangerous in beauty, something radical about that?

I think a lot of contemporary art is very nihilistic. It’s not able to deliver anything beyond the idea of paucity–of the sensory deprivation that we feel. I think a painting is an important opportunity to deliver something, to transport the viewer, and it’s not necessarily about physical notions of beauty versus the sublime. It’s about a certain activity or exploration where you come back with something….I don’t think I’m cynical at all about what I do; I don’t think there’s any alternative to believing in the infinite perfectibility of each and every one of us. For me there is no alternative to that. If that can be held in a painting, that is what I try to achieve.

–Philip Taaffe, being interviewed by David Coggins. Art in America, October 2008

You have talked about something being so much a type that it becomes a motif, whether it’s a pinecone or a crab.

It becomes a universal. It’s about recognition–all of a sudden there’s an incredibly vital response to something that has been there for a long time, but it’s as if we’ve just come across it. It comes from a place that’s deep within one’s own DNA. It’s a kind of personal identification that becomes a sum total of all its variations.

-Philip Taaffe, being interviewed by David Coggins. Art in America, October 2008